Civil Rights groups sue Jewish Mayor and NYPD

Yesterday, civil rights lawyers, filed a lawsuit in a Manhattan court on behalf of several civil rights groups, Muslim leaders and Muslim Giving Back, a registered charity. They’re all victims of the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims, lead by two of its pro-Israel top officials, deputy commissioner of intelligence and former FBI agent David Cohen, and the NYPD commissioner Raymond Kelly. The lawsuit also accused City’s Jewish Mayor Michael Bloomberg for supporting NYPD’s unlawful activities against America’s top religious community. Muslims makes over 3% of country’s total population of 304 million.

On Tuesday, supporters of the lawsuit formed a rally outside of the New York Police Department’s headquarters to reinforce their complaints.

“Our mosque should be an open, religious, spiritual sanctuary, but NYPD spying has turned it into a place of suspicion and censorship,” Hamid Hassan Raza, an imam named as a plaintiff in the case, said at the rally.

On March 11, 2003, American Muslim civil liberties groups issued report on violation of constitutional rights of Muslims. It listed how pro-Israel police officials’ illegal activities are harming the Muslim community at religious and social level. After conducting spying operation Muslim preachers at dozens of mosques, both Bloomberg and Kelly admitted that NYPD could not find a single proof that American Muslims were involved in terrorist activities against fellow Americans. The illegal spying operations against Muslim were first revealed in 2011.

An Associated Press (AP) investigation has revealed that the NYPD dispatched undercover officers into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program. Police also used informants, known as “mosque crawlers,” to monitor sermons, even when there was no evidence of wrongdoing.

The AP also determined that police subjected entire neighborhoods to surveillance and scrutiny, often because of the ethnicity of the residents, not because of any accusations of crimes. Hundreds of mosques and Muslim student groups were investigated and dozens were infiltrated. Many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD’s intelligence unit after 9/11.

Raymond Kelly has visited Israel several times to coordinate NYPD-Mossad intelligence operations in the US. American Jewish investigative journalist, Max Blumenthal, says that America’s security services have totally been Israelized.

“The process of Israelification began in the immediate wake of 9/11, when national panic led federal and municipal law enforcement officials to beseech Israeli security honchos for advice and training. America’s Israel lobby exploited the climate of hysteria, providing thousands of top cops with all-expenses paid trips to Israel and stateside training sessions with Israeli military and intelligence officials. By now, police chiefs of major American cities who have not been on junkets to Israel are the exception,” says Blumenthal.

The American Civil Liberty Union (ACLU), a Jewish-controlled group monitoring religious discrimination, is among the groups taking the NYPD to court. Jewish professor Nadine Strossen was president of ACLU during 1991-2008.

“When a police department turns law-abiding people into suspects because they go to a mosque and not a church or synagogue, it violates our Constitution’s guarantees of equality and religious freedom,” Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project, said in a press release announcing the suit.

“The lawsuit accuses New York City of violating the First and Fourteenth Amendments. It was filed at a time when the National Security Agency is under scrutiny for its extensive domestic spy tactics first revealed by contractor Edward Snowden. From the federal government to Big Apple’s police force, widespread domestic surveillance initiatives have left some Americans terrified, particularly Muslims whose daily activities are being secretly monitored by the NYPD,”reported RT on June 18, 2013.